Friday, May 22, 2015

Poet Elana Wolff and Artist Mary Lou Payzant Cross-Pollinate

Toronto poet Elana Wolff has recently published in EVENT
poetry and prose, Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review, The Nashwaak
Review, Rampike, and The Boneshaker Anthology. Her bilingual
collection of selected poems, Helle-borus & Alchémille (Noroît, 2013), was awarded the 2014 John Glassco Prize for Translation. Her latest work—a
collaborative inaugural translation from the Hebrew of Georg Mordechai Langer’s
Poems and Song of Love, released by Guernica Editions in fall 2014—is
now in its 2nd printing. Elana divides her professional time between writing,
editing, and designing and facilitating therapeutic social art courses.

Cross-Pollinating: On
Paintings by Mary Lou Payzant

Cape Breton native Mary Lou Payzant has
been painting for six decades. The catalogue of her oeuvre, if there were one,
would number in the hundreds—works of differing scales, executed in charcoal,
watercolour pencils, pastels, water-mixable oils, inks, papers, found objects,
and acrylic paint. Mary Lou’s paintings show influence of surrealism, of Vienna
artists Gustav Klimt and Friedensreich Hundertwasser, neo-Dadaist traces of
American artist Jasper Johns. The dreamy aura of memory, memento quality of
collage, sensuous overlapping layers of colour—brushed and rubbed; figures and
objects collected, quirkily juxtaposed and staged in vivid scenes.

I first met Mary Lou in the fall of 2007, in her Toronto studio, with its crow’s-eye view of the Royal Ontario Museum’s Lee-Chin Crystal. The Long Dash writing group and studio artists of the Women’s Art Association of Canada (WAAC) were gathered in Mary Lou’s room to explore the possibility of ekphrastic collaboration, the idea being that the writers would compose poems for works by the studio artists, or vice versa. We didn’t know what the initiative would bring, but thought it might culminate in a combined reading and exhibition celebrating National Poetry Month in April, 2008, which it did.

At that first fall meeting the writers
toured the artists’ studios, open to inspiration. The allusive images in Mary
Lou’s painting Night and Wind beckoned me immediately: the light/dark,
auroral-splashed palette, the partially disembodied figures—head and foreleg of
a horse, a vaguely-rendered rider, the frightened face of a shadowy
child—evoked Goethe’s poem “Erlkönig,” which depicts the abduction of a young
boy at the hands of the phantom Erl King. Mary Lou was struck by my response.
That piece began as a non-objective painting with no focus at all, she told me.
It was only a combination of colours and had nothing to do with things or
people. But as she worked, she related, faces kept appearing in the paint—the
head of a horse, a rider—and she was reminded of when she’d been a piano
accompanist, years prior. One of her favourite lieder was “Erlkönig” by Franz
Schubert; Schubert had set Goethe’s poem to music. Once the faces emerged, she
told me, the painting became a picture of that story, and could no longer be
non-objective. We were both struck—it’s not every beginning that brings such
synchrony.

2015 marks the 8th anniversary
of the Long Dash/WAAC collaboration and each round has culminated in a reading
and exhibition for National Poetry Month. The makeup of the groups has changed:
some of the original participants have moved on, others have joined. The Long
Dash poets have written what could by now be a full volume of poems for, after,
and in dialogue with paintings by WAAC studio artists. Some of the artists have
created works for poems too and a few of the writers have taken up the brush.
Cross-pollination has proliferated as relationships have deepened.

In 2010 Mary Lou moved to Halifax to be
closer to family, but her involvement with the grouphas continued uninterrupted. During the year
of the move she even took up the challenge of creating a new work for one of my
poems:

Hierarchies

Sun the husband. August, strong.

All Leo long he’s shone this way.
Consequently

Earth is thirsty—arid, unattractive. In-

side another wife is standing, mulling at
the sink.

She turns the water on whenever she
wants.

Wash, to rinse, and drink. Her neck and
temples

dewy where the seeds of sweat collect.

She lets her memory loose,

and pool,

go simple as a fish—whose days abate

in rhythmic pulsing: swim,

feed,

hide. The kitchen window wall-eyed.

She views her duplicate visage in the
green

beyond the glass, framed by arborvitae,

apple,

sumac.

Birds there know a few new tunes

they learned from flying skyward

where
hierarchies

sing in berths of blue.

Mary Lou titled the new painting Green
Lady. Do you think she looks like you? she asked me. I do see gestural
likeness—the language of the hands and hair, the wide eyes and brows raised in
something between wonder and puzzlement... It’s not an objective likeness. Mary
Louworked imaginatively—from words and
images in the poem. It’s a work of feeling—concerned more for what is living
and moving in the paint than what is ‘finished’. There’s the “wall-eyed”
“window”-look of the “wife” as “views her duplicate visage in green.” The hair
framing the face imports the greens of “arborvitae,” “apple,” and “sumac.” The
“rhythmic,” “simple as a fish[ness]” from the poem is rendered whimsically in
the painting.Any reflexive detachment present in the text is discharged
in favour of a naive immediacy, even sweetness, in Green Lady. In Mary
Lou’s creation I feel relational mirroring: the artist’s own wide eyes
reflecting the writer’s.

At the time Mary Lou was painting Green
Lady out of“Hierarchies,” I was
writing “High Park” for her painting Spring in High Park. The palettes
of both present gradations of green, in which the colour closest to the
light—yellow—and the colour closest to the dark—blue—meet and mingle in flora
and fauna-like forms. In both paintings there’s growth, hint of metamorphosis,
ebullience, also stylized quiet. Greenery flowing and growing in situ.
There’s an affirmatory quality to both too—representation heightening the real,
idealizing it almost, yet without any whiff of trickery. Spring in High Park
can be entered into metaphorically and dwelled in. What is expressed in the
work joins with what is aspired to, and the partner-poem aims to paint the
contemplative place of gazing into the shades of the painting:

High Park

She crossed the park and came to a
bridge,

crossed the bridge and came to a space,

entered the space and came to a secret

garden. She stood for a day

amid the green. Time went by

and added up. She drank

from the pond, slept

on the ground, ate from the edible

petals. Eventually, she came to resemble

the elements: water, earth, the

leafy oaks and redwood exhaling air.

Shimmering and rising ~ something like
fire.

Mary Lou frequently uses found
materials—hand-made papers, magazine images, tinfoil, candy wrappers—fashioning
her finds into collages. A shampoo ad might present a fall of hair that becomes
a waterfall, a desert, a meadow. It’s all metamorphosis, she says; creating
order out of chaos. The collages are studies, forays, prompts, as it were, that
alter as they’re transposed. The little collage titled Pain, made of
found papers and measuring only 3" x 4 ½”, is her smallest. The painting
that metamorphosed out of it measures 36" x 24". That painting,
created in 2004 during her husband’s final illness, kept growing and growing,
and could be perceived as “auto-therapy,” she says. Crisis is often followed by
painter’s block, which she usually works out of through the making of drawings
and collages. Elements of the crisis may appear re-presented in the art, yet
the art is not detached from the reality it transposes.

The flame-shapes
suggested in the Pain collage are carried over and accentuated in the Pain
painting. The vague leaf motif in the collage reappears in the painting too.
Asymmetrical forces are at work here: the oversized circle exceeding the frame,
the vermillion-capped crimson shafting up the centre like a limb pocked yellow.
There’s deliberateness to the imbalance in this piece, no attempt to redress
it. It’s a portrayal of an inchoate truthfulness. The Pain pieces show
“auto-therapy” at work, as both portrait and process. It’s believable.

In 2012 Mary Lou began work on what has
become a series she calls Fear of Falling. She’s completed four pieces
so far and doesn’t think she’s through yet. There’s no statute of limitations
on fears or ordeals—memories get triggered and shoot up. With these paintings,
as in dreams, the categories of outer reality seem to fall away as forces of
the inner world become freed. In Fear of Falling #1 a free-floating
synthesis opens on all sides.This piece had the same immediate,
visceral impact on me as the Erlkönig-connected Night and Wind piece
eight years prior. The poem I wrote began as a response to the colours,
textures, and aura of child-memory that I saw held sketchily in the overlapping
figures. At a certain point, it became unclear if I was writing about what I
was seeing in the painting or experiencing in my own activated imagination.
Such is the stuff:

Avian

Template for a naked day: a woman

falling on the sky, what will—

Feeling steers her, gravity has no hand.

Fear will keep her breathing

past a palette scratched and static.

Her shadow looks (to her) like splatter
on grass.

The splat could be forensic

yet this isn’t time of true or false

or crime investigation.

Colours imitate her tilt,

the primaries and neutrals.

Her sense of falling forward into one
recurring scene:

a child at night in bed,

a shade, a raiment.

She doesn’t call for help or else she
does and help is deaf.

She doesn’t call for help or else she
does and help is harm.

Long before she was a woman

postured falling forward,

the bird in her was static.

Fear would keep her breathing,

the
palette a requiting cry, woman naked in the sky.

Cradled in acrylic.

The outer world of inspiration and the
imaginative inner world of memory and association overlap. Distinctions aren’t
fully definable. Mary Lou responded enthusiastically to the first version of
the poem I sent her, titled “Remission.” I retracted that title—feeling it
overemphasized a therapeutic mission—and retitled it “Avian,” to reference the
sky palette and the flight/falling polarity. Art isn’t always restorative, even
if undertaken as “auto-therapy.” Painting and writing won’t reverse a trauma,
or necessarily heal wounds. But both can bring release and help the maker
process memory anew. After she’d read the first version of my poem, Mary Lou
revealed that her painting did have a child-connection, as I’d sensed, and was
rooted in a real-life trauma that happened more than a half century ago. Fear
of falling, Mary Lou confirmed, still lives with her and is a recurring theme
in her art. It is a theme that reaches deeply into the universal pool.

The Erlkönig painting and the one shown opposite the Avian poem [from the Fear of Flying series???] are really spectacular! Seeing the figures from unexpected angles and so full of movement is great. The article about Payzant's work is very interesting..

Narrative by Elana "Cross-Pollinating" is simply brilliant. Images sharp and clear. Paintings sublime. One can almost hear a poem talking to the painting. I particularly love the pairing "Green Lady" and "Hierarchies" - powerful.

Congratulations Elana - I do not want to know how much time you spend putting this presentation.

Though Mary Lou's paintings are intriguing and very much alive on their own, Elana's accompanying poems and writing encouraged me to experience the visuals with a greater intensity and complexity. The cooperative fusion of these two artists is most successful. Thank you, Mary Lou and Elana.

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We will consider all poems or paintings that incorporate poems as long as you own the rights. Please review blog entries to see the format and content we like. Then email your work with a short bio to ekblog2013@aol.com.